In a conventional word processor, once data is entered into a document, the data becomes a word or symbol without an attribute or property. For example, if the group of words “John Smith” is entered into a document being created with a conventional word processor, the group of words loses its attribute or property as a proper name to the word processor. This is so because the word processor cannot distinguish between “John Smith” as a proper name and “John Smith” as a group of words. It is this inability of the word processor that makes it necessary for the word processor to utilize the well known “search” or “search-and-replace” functions to find and/or replace each occurrence of a specific word or group of words in a single document. Moreover, if it is desired to find and/or replace a specific word or group of words in one or more related documents, it would be necessary using the word processor to open each related document containing an occurrence of the word or group of words and use the “search-and-replace” function to effect the change within each document.
It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to overcome the above problem and others by enabling one or more attributes or properties to be selectively assigned to one or more fields in a word processing document and then utilize these one or more properties to effect changes to data received in the one or more fields within a document or among related documents based on these one or more attributes or properties. Still other objects will become apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art upon reading and understanding the following detailed description.